Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Kaleidoscope quilt top - finished

This quilt took much longer than I thought. I meant to start it at June 2011 as part of Elizabeth's Kaleidoscope QAL, but started only in January 2012, more than 3 months ago... Sure, I have lots of excuses (travel, family, life) but the real reason for the delay is that I wasn't happy with the results and really got stuck. The quilt top was OK, but I could not get excited with it, which made it very hard to work on it. I kept making more blocks, added some red to make it less drab, but still was not happy. The breakthrough came when I changed the placement of the blocks to get diagonal lines of red, blue and green, which gave the quilt more movement.

This pattern was a real challenge for me. Using templates is very time consuming, and I didn't realize how hard it is matching all the points (of course most of the points don't match, but at this point I gave up)

Each block is 10.5 inch (26.5 cm) final size. The top measures 64x76 inch (163x193cm).

Now that the top is finished I have decide about quilting. I'm debating whether to quilt circles to echo the kaleidoscope circles. It looks too hard for me and I hardly did any FMQ.I'd love to get your suggestions for quilting!

Love it! If you decide to do circles, I would be tempted to pick one circle near the center but offset. Then do radiating circles out from that one, like an echo. Go inside that one circle and echo the star(I guess you'd call it a star!) inward. Just a thought...